Toolkits overview

A toolkit is a bundle of capabilities your AI gains when you install it.

Concretely, a toolkit can add:

New views in your sidebar (an Ideas tab, a Finance tab, a CRM tab).
New playbooks your AI can run (a “weekly review” playbook, a “comparison chart” lens).
New goals that fire on schedules (a “content pipeline” goal, an “expense review” goal).
New entity types (Ideas, Bills, Customers, Recipes).
New integrations (a Stripe connector, an Airtable connector, a custom API).
New actions your AI can take in conversation (categorizing, suggesting, formatting).

You install a toolkit once. From then on, your AI has those capabilities everywhere it goes, in every channel, scoped to whatever entities make sense.

Why toolkits exist

Without toolkits, your AI is a general assistant. It can chat, take notes, send emails, manage tasks. That’s plenty for the first week.

But “general” eventually hits limits. Producing weekly content benefits from specialized structure (the Forge toolkit). Tracking customer relationships benefits from a CRM. Managing money benefits from financial primitives the general assistant doesn’t have.

Rather than build every feature into the core, Jootle ships a small, sharp core and lets you install toolkits as you need them. The benefit is that your sidebar stays clean (you don’t have a Finance tab if you don’t use Finance), and the AI’s defaults stay focused.

What a toolkit looks like installed

When you install a toolkit, three things happen:

A new sidebar entry appears. For example, installing “Ideas” adds an “Ideas” item in your sidebar. Clicking it opens that toolkit’s workspace.
New capabilities become available in chat. Once Ideas is installed, you can say “capture this as an idea” and your AI knows what to do. Before installing, that phrase wouldn’t have produced anything specific.
New playbooks and goals appear in your Playbooks and Goals views. Each toolkit usually contributes a few of each, ready to run.

You don’t reconfigure anything. Installation is a single click in the library, and the new capabilities are live within seconds.

Built-in vs. library toolkits

Some toolkits are installed by default on every new instance:

Chat (well, this is always present).
Projects, Lists, Goals, Artifacts, Contacts. The shared primitives.

Others come pre-installed but optional:

Ideas, Forge, Finance, CRM, Game Arcade. Common toolkits most customers want.

The full library offers many more. You browse, you install what fits, and your AI absorbs the capability.

A complete tour of the most common built-in toolkits is in Built-in toolkits.

Uninstalling

Toolkits can be uninstalled. The sidebar entry disappears, the playbooks and goals it added are deactivated, and your AI stops referencing the toolkit’s terminology in responses.

Your data is not deleted. If you had ideas captured in the Ideas toolkit and you uninstall it, the data sits dormant; reinstalling brings it back. Same for any other toolkit’s data.

If you genuinely want a toolkit’s data gone, there’s a separate “delete this toolkit’s data” action after uninstall. It’s irreversible, by design.

Tip: install when you need, not before

Customers sometimes try to install every toolkit on day one “to see what’s there”. Don’t.

The first week with a clean sidebar is one of the most pleasant experiences. Your AI’s responses stay focused on your work, not on the universe of features that might exist. When you actually need a specific capability (“I want a better way to manage my reading list”), install the relevant toolkit then. The friction of one-click install is small enough that you won’t lose time.

If you’re not sure what’s available, browse the library on a weekend afternoon, not in your first hour.

What a toolkit is NOT

Toolkits are not:

A plugin store with random shovelware. Every toolkit in the library is vetted by Jootle or marked as community-contributed with appropriate flags. There’s no equivalent of “install this random extension and hope”.
Permanent. You can uninstall anytime.
Required. A blank-state Jootle is a fine Jootle. Toolkits add capabilities; they don’t unlock you to do basic things.
Free of cost in every case. Most are free. A few use third-party services (e.g., a CRM that integrates with a paid SaaS) and you’d configure the upstream cost separately.

How toolkits interact

Multiple toolkits installed at once compose well. The Ideas toolkit and the Forge toolkit work together: an idea can graduate into a Forge content assignment. CRM and Calendar combine: a CRM contact’s record includes upcoming calendar events with them.

You don’t have to wire these together. The toolkits know about each other where it makes sense.

Custom toolkits

You can build your own toolkit for needs unique to your business. The chapter Building your own toolkits covers the model. The full developer reference (the JTF spec) is technical and lives in the developer docs.

You can also import a toolkit someone else built (Importing and exporting).

The library

The library is where you browse and install. It’s worth a 15-minute browse once you’re past the first week, to see what exists that you didn’t know you wanted.